From – https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1KhnG2VEMy/

Mo Husseini

(cross posted from Threads):

The Ayatollah’s Thank-You Card.

Right. Before I start, let me inoculate against the wilful misreading that is already forming in someone’s bad-faith little brain: I am not defending the Iranian government. Clear? Good.

Moving on.

The Iranian government is a theocratic horror show. Full stop. It hangs gay teenagers from cranes in public squares, which is a sentence I should not have to write in 2026 and yet here we bloody well are.

It shoots its own daughters in the street for the crime of letting their hair exist in sunlight, and then, in a flourish of bureaucratic sadism that would make Kafka weep, sends the parents a bill for the ammunition.

It funds every proxy militia, ideological murder franchise, and freelance chaos engine between Beirut and Sana’a.

It took a revolutionary promise of liberation and curdled it, within about fifteen minutes, into exactly the repressive theocratic apparatus it replaced, because that is what happens when you let men who think God is their constituency run a country.

Every time.

Without exception.

Show me the theocracy that didn’t eat its own children and I will show you a theocracy that just hasn’t been around long enough yet.

The morality police.

Evin Prison.

The mass executions that don’t even make the news anymore because they are as regular as weather.

Mahsa Amini, murdered by the state for wearing her hijab wrong, and then five hundred more people murdered for having the temerity to be upset about the first murder.

I have no illusions about this government.

Zero f**king illusions.

I would like to see it gone.

Iranians would like to see it gone.

The Iranian diaspora has been screaming for that since before I was old enough to know what a diaspora was.

And yet, through a feat of diplomatic and military incompetence so towering, so perfectly, almost artistically catastrophic, that it deserves its own wing in whatever museum future civilizations build to catalogue the stupidity of this era, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have managed, in the space of five weeks, to make this gang of theocratic murderers into the sympathetic party.

The underdog. The outfit that half the planet is, against every sane instinct, against the full weight of the historical record, quietly and then not so quietly rooting for.

Sit with that: The Iranian government spent forty-seven years (forty-seven years!) doing everything in its power to make itself despised by every sentient being on the planet, and these two men, these two vain, reckless, messianic f**king wrecking balls, undid all of it in five weeks.

They made the mullahs sympathetic.

They made Pezeshkian, a man who presides over a government that hangs people from construction equipment, sound like the adult in the room. They made Iranian state media, Iranian state media!, more credible to the global public than the White House press office.

That is not an easy thing to accomplish.

That takes a special, rarefied, once-in-a-generation genius for f**king things up.

The Iranian embassies are trolling Trump on social media. And winning.

The embassy in Zimbabwe posted “We’ve lost the keys” about the Strait of Hormuz.

South Africa replied, “Shh, the key’s under the flowerpot, just open for friends.”

Bulgaria dropped an Epstein joke.

These are embassies. In Zimbabwe and Bulgaria.

Running a funnier, sharper, more strategically coherent communications operation than the United States of America, the country that invented the concept of soft power, the country that gave the world Hollywood and Madison Avenue and the f**king Marshall Plan, and they are doing it with memes, from countries most Americans could not locate with a GPS and a police escort, and it is working, because the comparison does all the lifting.

When your opponent is promising to end your civilization with three exclamation marks while signing off “Praise be to Allah” on Easter morning, you do not need to be good.

You do not need to be competent or kind or decent.

You just need to be less insane than the other guy.

The hanging-teenagers-from-cranes government is clearing that bar with room to spare, which should tell you everything you need to know about where the bar currently sits: underground, in a hole, and still sinking.

This is what bombardment does.

This is what it has always done.

You bomb a country’s schools and universities and hospitals, you kill its children, you threaten to destroy its power grid in the syntax of a going-out-of-business sale, and you hand the regime the one thing forty-seven years of domestic repression could never, ever generate organically: legitimacy.

The hard, diamond-bright legitimacy of victimhood. Of being the ones getting bombed. Of being the ones whose children are under the rubble while the man doing it can’t spell “reign” and thinks Persia is a type of carpet.

Fourteen million Iranians have volunteered to fight. You think they love their government?

Motherf**kers, these folks were in the streets three years ago trying to pull the thing down with their bare hands.

But you bomb a country, and the population rallies around the flag, because that is what human beings do under fire, that is the one iron law of aerial bombardment that every military thinker since Bomber Harris has understood and articulated and written down in books that are available in libraries, and that Trump and Netanyahu have apparently never encountered, because reading would require an attention span longer than a TikTok and a humility neither man has ever been accused of possessing.

The regime was dying.

It was eating itself from the inside out.

Economy in freefall.

Youth population furious, secular, educated, online, and completely done with the whole project.

The women’s movement, the movement that Mahsa Amini’s murder ignited, was the most potent internal threat the Islamic Republic had faced since 1979.

Time, demographics, economics, culture, all of it was working against the mullahs.

All the West had to do was keep the sanctions in place, support civil society quietly, and let the internal contradictions do what internal contradictions always eventually do.

Instead, Trump and Netanyahu handed the mullahs the greatest gift they have received since Saddam Hussein invaded in 1980: an external enemy so loud, so stupid, so cartoonishly villainous that the entire country had no choice but to rally behind the one institution still standing, however rotten, however despised.

The regime was on life support, flatlining, the monitors beeping their final beeps, and these two men walked into the hospital room, ripped out the DNR order, and administered a blood transfusion.

With someone else’s blood, naturally.

With the blood of Iranian children and American service members and Lebanese civilians and Israeli civilians and Emirati bystanders.

Because it is always someone else’s blood.

It is never, ever, ever the blood of the men who make the decisions.

In Tehran, someone should be writing a card tonight:

“Dear Donald & Bibi.

Thank you for doing what years of our incompetence could not.

Thank you for making us sympathetic.

Thank you for uniting our population when they were ready to tear us apart.

Thank you for handing us the moral high ground, a place we have never in our miserable history deserved to stand and could never have reached on our own merits. We owe you one.

Sincerely, Iran.

P.S. We still have the keys.”

The Iranian people deserve so much better than their government.

We also deserve better than ours.